In a mere 34 days, a sure Republican win crumpled into an upset in Alabama’s special election for the US Senate. It was 34 days ago—though it may feel much longer—that Republican Roy Moore was accused by women of dating them when they were teenagers, with one saying that he tried to initiate sex when she was just 14. Since then, Moore has vigorously denied those allegations, even as additional women came forward to accuse him of harassment and assault.
Despite the scandal, the outspoken ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalist, who beat the more mainstream Luther Strange in a GOP primary, was not out of the race. Though the national party pulled its support in the wake of the initial Washington Post story about the accusations, after Donald Trump endorsed Moore the Republican National Committee began funding him again in the last week of the race. It wasn’t enough, with Democrat Doug Jones eking out a victory by a little more than a percentage point. (Moore has not yet conceded.)
Backlash against Moore among suburban Republicans, and a newly energized Democratic base, created an unlikely coalition that propelled Jones to victory as the first Alabama Democrat elected to the Senate in a quarter-century and the first to win any statewide office in nearly a decade. It was a banner day for Jones, who also celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary on Tuesday.
In Jefferson County, Alabama’s largest, which is home to both Democrat-voting Birmingham and wealthy suburban Republican power bases, Jones won by some 83,000 votes. His statewide margin of victory was fewer than 21,000 ballots. Overall turnout was nearly 41 percent, far above the secretary of state’s election-eve estimate of 25 percent of the state’s 3.3 million voters.
The write-in vote was another factor. More than 22,000 people statewide cast write-in ballots, including Richard Shelby, Alabama’s senior Republican senator. Saying Moore’s accusers were credible and Alabama’s GOP could “do better,” Shelby made a point of publicly announcing he voted for an unnamed “distinguished Republican” rather than Moore and urged fellow Republicans to do the same.
Jones’s victory is remarkable on multiple levels. The state Democratic Party, which has been all but dead for a decade, has not gone much above 40 percent recently in any statewide vote. Moore, who has built a strong following for his evangelical views and for thumbing his nose at federal authority, generally can rely on fervent support by one-third of the dominant state Republican Party, especially in rural counties. National media coverage criticizing Moore, and national Republicans’ and Democrats’ calls for him to drop out of the race was expected to motivate his voters even further. Plus, state GOP leaders fervently backed Moore, and warned Republicans to toe the party line.
But establishment Republicans in Alabama—the business wing and well-to-do suburbanites—never liked Moore. He was elected Alabama’s chief justice twice and booted from office both times for refusing to follow federal court orders. His extreme views on homosexuality (he has suggested being gay should be illegal) and religion (he said 9/11 was God’s retribution on the US and contended Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress) further alienated the establishment Republican wing and even created concerns Moore’s election to the Senate could drive potential economic development and tourism out of state. The recent allegations that Moore pursued teens as an adult—including a woman’s charge in mid-November that Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 16—were too much for those Republicans.
Alabama’s four major urban areas—Birmingham/Hoover (Jefferson County), Huntsville (Madison County), Montgomery, and Mobile—all backed Jones. Mobile County, which supported Donald Trump with 56 percent of the vote in 2016, went 56 percent for Jones on Tuesday. Madison County, which also gave Trump 56 percent, reversed to back the Democrat. Central Alabama’s Black Belt counties—farm country with rich, black soil spreading east and west from Montgomery—mostly voted overwhelmingly for Jones. Jefferson, Montgomery, and the Black Belt counties all have substantial African-American populations, who voted nearly as a bloc for the Democrat. Exit polls also showed stronger-than-expected support for Jones among women, though Moore had the edge among white women, including white women with college degrees.
It was one of the strangest elections in some time in Alabama. Bikers for Trump showed Moore some political love while women dressed in Handmaidens Tale garb protested him. Trump, who supported Moore’s opponent in the Republican primary, endorsed Moore and recorded a robocall for him this week, while Barack Obama recorded one for Jones. Moore bet big by showcasing Steve Bannon at rallies; Jones raised the ante with a free concert by Alabama natives Jason Isbell and St. Paul and the Broken Bones. And Moore, as is his habit, rode his horse Sassy to the polls Tuesday, reportedly telling media thronging around his skittish ride, “You get in my way you’ll get run over, so I’m giving you warning.”
For many inside and outside Alabama, Tuesday’s special election came down to morals. Jones’s pro-choice stance normally would be a dealbreakers in Alabama, where most voters say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
But, in the #metoo era, the election arguably boiled down to whether a majority of voters were willing to overlook credible evidence Moore was a sexual predator of teenaged girls. As al.com columnist John Archibald put it, Alabama voters “made a political decision that many found hard, a decision that put decency over party, character over tribe. It stood for mothers and sisters and daughters and fellow human beings.”
Moore refused to concede defeat Tuesday night. There is some talk he will seek a recount, which is automatic if the candidates wind up less than one-half of one percentage point apart. With only provisional ballots uncounted, Jones currently leads comfortably in the automatic recount context by 1.54 percentage points.
Many in Alabama were worried Moore’s election would make him the state’s new George Wallace, an enduring symbol of intolerance and prejudice to the rest of the nation and the world. Jones, a former US attorney who won murder convictions in 2001 and 2002 against two Klansmen in the notorious 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, campaigned on a theme of putting Alabama on the “right side of history.”
In his victory speech Tuesday, Jones invoked Dr. Martin Luther King’s quote about the long moral arc of the universe bending toward justice. “Tonight,” Jones told his supporters, “in this time, in this place, you helped bend that moral arc a little closer to that justice.”
Eric Velasco is a freelance writer based in Birmingham, Alabama. A journalist for 35 years, he has covered numerous Alabama elections and has researched the influence of money and advertising in judicial election nationally.
Before the polls closed in Alabama Tuesday night, signaling defeat for conservative judge and alleged sexual predator Roy Moore, his spokesperson went on CNN to discuss some of the Senate candidate's more controversial views. But as he was trying to explain to The Lead's Jake Tapper why Moore believes Muslims can't serve in the US government, the CNN host shared a fact about the Bible that left spokesman Ted Crockett completely speechless.
"Judge Moore has also said that he doesn't think a Muslim member of Congress should be allowed to be in Congress. Why?" Tapper asked. "Under what provision of the Constitution?"
"Because you have to swear on the Bible," Crockett said. "You have to swear on a Bible to be an elected official in the United States of America. He alleges that a Muslim cannot do that, ethically, swearing on the Bible."
Tapper then explained that actually, no, there isn't a law requiring elected officials to swear on a Bible before taking office. In the Constitution, there's an article that states "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." Still, that didn't discourage Moore from arguing that Representative Keith Ellison, who is a Muslim, shouldn't be allowed to serve in Congress because he chose to be sworn in on a Qur'an.
"You don’t actually have to swear on a Christian Bible. You can swear on anything, really. I don’t know if you knew that. You can swear on a Jewish Bible," Tapper said. "The law is not that you have to swear on a Christian Bible."
At that, Crockett sat dumbfounded, mouth agape, blinking at the camera for roughly seven seconds of airtime. He then tried to argue that couldn't be true, since Donald Trump swore on a Bible when he was sworn in as president.
"Because he’s Christian, and he picked it. That’s what he wanted to swear in on," Tapper replied, before quickly signing off. "Good luck tonight. Thank you so much for being here."
The full ten-minute interview was almost as stunning as Democrat Doug Jones's upset victory, which Moore still hasn't conceded. But it was also just wild to watch someone representing the campaign of the "Ten Commandments Judge" be completely stumped on a new fact about the Bible.
Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.
US News
Doug Jones Defeats Roy Moore in Alabama The Democrat won the special election for a Senate seat in the red state, beating Moore by around 1.5 percent. The embattled Republican refused to concede and cited the possibility of a recount, though recounts require the margin of victory to be within 0.5 percent. President Trump acknowledged Jones’s victory, tweeting his congratulations and adding that “Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!”—VICE News
Former FBI Staffers Called Trump an ‘Idiot’ The Department of Justice revealed text messages shared between former FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who both worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team. Both Strzok and Page referred to Trump as an “idiot,” and Strzok said: “God Hillary should win 100,000,000–0.” Mueller fired Strzok in July when he learned of the texts. Page had already left the counsel’s operation.—Politico
Rex Tillerson Wants a Sit-Down with North Korea The embattled secretary of state said “we’re ready to talk anytime North Korea would like to talk… Let’s just meet, and we can talk about the weather if you want.” Tillerson’s remarks at the Atlantic Council meeting seemed to indicate a shift in tack, but White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said “the president’s views on North Korea have not changed.”—CNN
Homeless Camp Cook-Out Implicated in Skirball Fire Investigators said they traced the origin of the massive blaze in the Bel Air area of Los Angeles to an illegal cooking fire at a camp set up by homeless people. Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Erik Scott said camp remains were found under Interstate 405 near Sepulveda Boulevard.—AP
International News
Turkey Calls for Recognition of Palestinian Capital in Jerusalem Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, suggested ahead of a meeting of representatives from 50 Islamic nations that they must “encourage other countries” to acknowledge the existence of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas spoke at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation summit, which began Wednesday in Istanbul.—Reuters
Philippines Prolongs State of Martial Law The country’s Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of President Rodrigo Duterte's appeal to uphold martial law in the Mindanao region until the end of next year. A rebellion by Islamist militants on the southern island was quashed in October, but Duterte said there was still a threat from ISIS sympathizers as well as “communist terrorists.”—Al Jazeera
Dozens Left Dead After Airstrike in Yemen A strike on a prison camp in Sanaa by Saudi-led coalition forces killed at least 39 people and injured at least 90 others, according to officials on the ground. The Saudi-led air campaign has targeted the Iran-backed Houthi militants now in control of the Yemeni capital. The destroyed military police facility had reportedly held 180 prisoners.—Reuters
Egyptian Pop Star Jailed for ‘Indecent’ Music Video A court in Egypt sentenced 25-year-old Shaimaa Ahmed, better known as Shyma, to two years in prison for “inciting debauchery” and producing an “indecent” music video. Her “I Have Issues” clip featured the singer eating a banana in her underwear. The director was also given a two-year sentence in absentia.—BBC News
Everything Else
MGMT Return with New Single The band released “When You Die,” the second track from its forthcoming album Little Dark Age. A video for the song stars Girls actor Alex Karpovsky as a magician who dies and comes back to life.—SPIN
Trump Family Struggles with NYC Mayoral Ballot, Report Says The president was said to screw up his own birthday on an absentee ballot for the city’s mayoral race, writing that it fell a month later than it actually does. His wife, Melania, apparently forgot to sign her envelope, and his daughter Ivanka failed to mail her ballot in on time.—VICE
Starbucks Customer’s Laptop Used to Mine Cryptocurrency Noah Dinkin was hit with miner code designed to steal bitcoin or some similar currency while he used the WiFi in a Starbucks in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The company said it took “swift action to ensure our internet provider resolved the issue.”—Motherboard
EPA Boss Probed for Buying $25,000 Soundproof Booth An inspector general was said to be investigating Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt for spending the agency’s money on a soundproofed room. The purchased booth reportedly amounted to a shipping container without windows.—VICE News
Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we're discussing the scientists searching for a "gay gene," and whether the potential risks outweigh the benefits.
If you haven't heard the story of Keaton Jones yet, here's his deal: Keaton, a young boy from Tennessee, broke down in his mom's car one day reliving the things some bullies had put him through at school. His mom then decided to record it and subsequently share the footage online. Soon the instantly viral video caught the attention of major celebrities, including JR Smith, LeBron James, Jemele Hill, and even a sandwich-eating Justin Bieber.
Things were looking up for Keaton, but like so many others that tumble into the spotlight, this feel-good story quickly took a darker turn. We soon found out that his mom posted two different photos of her and her family grinning with the Confederate flag, leading many to believe that she's actually a racist bigot.
On Tuesday's episode of Desus & Mero, the hosts walk through the story's many twists and turns, from the family's lukewarm apology to Keaton's uncanny resemblance to a certain football star.
You can watch last night’s Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.
Director Errol Morris is just a “different” kind of filmmaker. The kind of different that breaks thematic rules with genre-blending docs like A Thin Blue Line (1988). The kind of different that conceives entire new ways of interviewing subjects via something called an Interrotron method; and the kind of different that will say odd things like,“When I was first going out with my wife, I told her that while I was interviewing a serial killer, I was still thinking of her.” Yes, Morris told me that in a phone conversation, and yes, he’s that brand of romantic.
It’s what he’s always done, and it’s what he’s continuing to do in his latest murky and mysterious docu-series Wormwood on Netflix. Part drama, part documentary, Errol has taken on the story involving the 1953 suicide of Frank Olson—a CIA operative who had little reason to off himself. It’s a dramatization that twists, rotates, and examines the particulars surrounding his death through the eyes of his still living son, Eric Olson. Eric has long suspected that some bullshit was at foot involving some CIA goons, some LSD, leading to something that was less suicidal and more murderish. And through the lead roles of Molly Parker, Christian Camargo, and Peter Sarsgaard, Morris seems to have created something that’s as much fiction as it is fact.
In a phone conversation with all three actors and Morris, I took a little time dissecting the appeal of this conspiracy theory and why everyone involved believe it to be such a beautiful time to start questioning the government again.
From the left to the far right, Christian Camaro, Errol Morris, Peter Sarsgaard, and Molly Parker. | Courtesy of Netflix.
VICE: I want to get at the particular attraction for you guys involving Eric’s story and his father. Conspiracy theories as a whole are a dime a dozen. Errol Morris: Are they really?
Well yeah, type in conspiracy theory in any search engine. Peter Sarsgaard: Well not so in the governments using LSD sort of way.
True. I guess I want you guys to elaborate on that specific thing about this story that seemed so uniquely intriguing. Morris: Well the story, the CSI mind controlling program, Project MKUltra in general, conspiracy theorists eat that up. I’m sorry, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, although, clearly, there have been many conspiracies that have gone on in my past and around me. My usual line is that people are far too much at cross purposes with each other. Formulatively stupid, and in a group, can usually conspire to do and believe anything. Although I have to say, I did conspire with these guys to make Wormwood. We’ve only been able to keep it a secret for so long. The guess the cat's out of the bag.
Sarsgaard: The attraction for me to be honest, was around shining a light on a quote on quote conspiracy theory in real life that would lead to the fact that there’s no conspiracy theory at all. That we’re actually looking for the truth and following a son’s quest who's attempting to find out what happened to his father. It actually becomes much more interesting to partake in that, and play characters, who in my case, sorta disappeared. He doesn’t really exist except from a single picture and signature. This stuff happened in our own backyard. This wasn’t Russia, or China, this happened in America just a few years ago. This had its hands in Korea, Russia, Donald Rumsfeld, and people who are actually present in today’s society with issues that also remain present today. All that was a huge lure, and I intended to support Errol, but instead, he gave me a part himself.
Morris: Lucky me.
The story isn’t what I expected. It’s not just about this larger conspiracy, it’s also about this guy Eric and his obsession. How did your thoughts of him change over the course of the project? Morris: It's a question I don't know if I'm willing to answer. (laughs)
Sarsgaard: Right, yes, don't answer that question. I’ll personally say this, I didn’t communicate with him very much. And mainly because for an actor, something like this, getting to try to understand who this guy was on some sort of deep level by speaking to Eric for example is tough. I mean, I’ve played a number of characters based on real life people, and I always find, strangely, that to speak to the people that had the closest relationships with the person can provide its own confusion. Everybody has a strong agenda for the people they once knew. So for me, I thought of my own parents.
My own father. A person who was very much a product of the 50s. But the way my dad even talks about the government now, even after Watergate, and Project MKUltra, the Pentagon Papers and the rest, is with some expectation that it is a place that tries to tell you the truth, but messes up every once in awhile. My experience paints it as a place that operates us to get us to believe and think what they want us to believe and think. So it’s all very much like this expectation level in mind for people like my father who was a military man himself. He just wanted to give what he could to his country as a mathematician. It’s an idealism that I no longer think exists today, and is very much a product of that time.
I imagine there’s a balance between what’s compelling and something that’s more akin to a reenactment. What freedoms did you guys have? Morris: I don’t know very much about acting at all. I imagine what it must be like to be an actor. That’s why the term reenactment for example, is such a strange term. For an actor to actually embody this kind of role, they have to find it, not in comparison to the world outside themselves, but they have to rather find it inside of themselves. And I believe that each and every one of these guys did just that, and the result is that these roles are very, very powerful and moving.
I tell everyone, never give actors directions before you see what they’re about to do, because you may have destroyed everything. Say nothing, wait for them to do what they do, and if it’s good, it’s done. You don’t have to do anymore, they’ve done all the heavy lifting for you, so just shut up. And that as true time and again. Christian in particular amazed me time and again with his performances. I could never have directed that, come on! It’s just not possible. A kind of wealth of subtlety, ambiguity, and confusion. Christian does confusion and moral ambiguity better than anybody.
Christian Camaro: It confuses me all the time. It confused me for 20 years. (laughs)
Molly Parker: Some of us feel like acting is like cooking...OK wait, I've actually never expressed this before.
Morris: You mean like a recipe?
Parker: Well you put things in...OK, I’m going to start again, I’m just gonna let that metaphor go. (laughs). But what I wanted to say is, what comes out, usually isn’t what I had planned on coming out. My performances often come as a surprise to me. So what was quite enjoyable doing this project is that we had this script, these scenes, and this story with these characters, and then there was the archival information about these people. And there was everything that Errol knew and shared, and then there was the everything that Errol knew and didn’t share, you sort of take all of those things in. When I first sat with him, I had questions about this character, and we had a really nice dinner, and after I left, I thought, he didn’t even answer any of my questions (laughs). He’s so tricky. But I still came away with knowing how to play her. That’s the alchemy of what I love about doing this job. You can’t re-create it, that isn’t possible. You just put in all the things you’ve given, and something comes out on the other end. Oh my god...that’s so bad.
Sarsgaard: That sounds like a shitting metaphor now.
Parker: (laughs) god.
Camaro: That’s what’s so unique about combining the documentary format and the narrative fiction format. It’s all serving the greater good, which is the theme of finding the truth. I only call Errol a genius because I don’t think Errol knows that he’s one. He’s using all the nuance that we ascribe to fiction into a search for the truth, and relating it to an actual event that happened. Combining those two forms is amazing. No one has ever done it like this.
Sarsgaard: Honestly, he’s the most charming guy that I know that knows as many serial killers past and present. It’s amazing with this guy. He’s known a lot of people like that, yet he has a natural buoyancy when you talk and meet him.
Morris: When I was first going out with my wife, I told her that while I was talking to a serial killer, I was thinking of you. (laughs)
Parker: That's really sweet
Eric Olson courtesy of Netflix.
Given the state of the US government right now, how do you guys place the importance of stories like this at this particular time. Christian: It’s incredibly important. It’s vital and crucial. The whole Eric Olson story as seen through Eric...makes you question just how crazy Eric must be for speaking the truth as much as he does. But without speaking for that truth, we come complacent as many Americans have become I believe.
Sarsgaard: And look how misinformation destroyed people's lives.
Christian: Exactly. We have to be committed to finding the truth, it’s the only way we’re going to effect change, is finding out, for ourselves, the truth. If we’re going to believe all of this stuff including the media, we have to go through our own fact finding mission. And that’s what Eric is doing. We need that now more than ever in this country.
Morris: We need to just start thinking. One wonders how things have become this bleak in America.
Camargo: Yeah, I blame Canada.
Morris: Here's a question for you, we would love an answer. Is Canada truly responsible for everything that has gone wrong in the world?
Yes, yes we are.
Catch Wormwood when it debuts December 15th on Netflix.
According to the Associated Press, former Apprentice star Omarosa Manigault left her gig at the White House Tuesday to "pursue other opportunities," after spending roughly a year doing a job that even she couldn't clearly explain.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made the official announcement on Tuesday, saying that Manigault's last day will be January 20. According to the White House, Manigault "resigned," but according to tworeporters in DC, she may have been fired. Things reportedly got pretty ugly, and security had to escort her off the White House grounds.
Officially, Manigault was earning $179,700 a year as director of communications for the White House Public Liaison Office, which reaches out to leaders in business, religious associations, and other groups to pick up some support for the president's agenda. But according to Politico, the office is arguably the most dysfunctional part of Trump's administration—what one former senior official called "a dumpster fire place to work"—and even among insiders, Manigault's day-to-day role was largely a mystery.
According to the Daily Beast, Manigault was "despised" in the White House, but Trump had a soft spot for her and the two had developed some serious trust. She apparently felt right at home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—so comfortable that she didn't think twice about scattering her shoes all over the place or hosting a wild, 39-person bridal photoshoot on the grounds unannounced.
Sanders wouldn't explain exactly why Manigault left Team Trump, only telling BuzzFeed, "we wish her the best in future endeavors and are grateful for her service."
When Disney announced it was making a live-action version of Lion King, Desus, Mero, and their Bodega Hive flooded Twitter with desperate pleas and photoshopped images of the two as Timon and Pumbaa. But, alas, Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner snagged those parts, and the VICELAND hosts will not be the ones singing alongside Donald Glover and Queen Bey.
So when Rogen dropped by Desus & Mero Tuesday night, the hosts—who were still salty about the casting choice—asked why he got the part over them. But instead of defending Disney's choice, Rogen agreed that Desus and Mero deserved to be Simba's carefree best friends more than he did.
The actor kept pretty tight-lipped about the new film—seeing as the hosts could use some spoilers to blackmail Disney into giving them their rightful roles—but he did say that, unfortunately, you won't be seeing Pumbaa smoking any blunts onscreen.
You can watch last night’s Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.
OK, let's start this with a quick game. The game is called "Spot the Cool Place" and the instructions are pretty much in the title. Here we go:
A Mitre 10 in Canberra
Any place in the UK that's not London
Cuba
Did you answer "Cuba"? Then congratulations! You are correct and you intrinsically understand the nuances of this story. And that's because some places are cool (as you know) while other places are not (you totally got that too!), and visiting cool places looks good on Instagram. Not only that, but predicting which places look the best on Instagram influences how much people like you will visit them. And there's a study to prove it.
The survey comes courtesy of the University of Georgia, where researchers quizzed 758 people on their desire to visit Cuba. Of all the destinations, Cuba was chosen because of its recent availability to US tourists. Because the country has been locked up for so long it's widely considered an authentic travel experience, but only in the short term. As the study highlights, "the narrative 'see Cuba before it becomes 'Mcdonaldized' has been internalized by masses of American tourists."
With this in mind, researchers quizzed respondents on whether they would like to visit sometime in the next year, the next five years, or the next 10. And then people were asked several questions about their travel motivations based on the timeframe they selected. And the answers were telling: People wanting to see Cuba in the coming year were far more likely to be motivated by the promise of "likes" on social media, whereas people content to wait another 5-10 years had more of an interest in the country itself.
As the reaserches rather dryly noted: "the symbolic value of social media posts about travel experiences has a greater influence on intentions to travel in the short-term compared to the long-term."
They suggested such findings were useful to travel agencies as "destinations with high social media potential could take advantage of the 'bandwagon effect' and the 'snob effect' as they wax and wane in popularity."
So there you go. In a roundabout kind of way, your sense that people who post selfies in Phuket don't know what's up has been vindicated by science. But then all your activewear snaps from Machu Picchu have been shown to be transparent, narcissistic, and pathetic... so maybe you lose as well.
Christmas is a silly time to take drugs. Your family is around, your nose is full of cold and physically incapable of allowing anything in or out, and you've spent all your money on scented candles and phenomenally expensive soap for family members who don't really need scented candles or a major upgrade to their soap.
So, in reality, thinking totally pragmatically, drugs are the last thing you should be doing during the festive period. But all those hastily-organised "Christmas drinks" don't really lend themselves to pragmatism, and chances are you're not going to let the addition of some decorations to the street-lamps outside the pub affect your decision-making five pints in.
With that in mind, here's a handy set of dos and dont's that you can take heed of, or just completely forget about on the night and then remember vividly and painfully the following morning, wetness in your eyes and vomit creeping up your throat, as you google, again, for the hundredth time this year, "why am I such a prick".
(Photo: Jake Lewis)
DON'T TAKE DRUGS AT THE WORK DO
Unless your boss is a genuine friend – beers-on-the-weekend-level; a WhatsApps-you-pictures-worthy-of-an-HR-assessment kinda friend – don't turn up and offer them a line. It comes across as desperate, and if your boss is a square it will get you fired, or at best mean you have to sit through a disciplinary and go to a weekly counselling session with a man called Greg who thinks he knows more about fun than you.
Generally, unless you work in music, advertising or finance – all industries whose workers depend exclusively on class A drugs to get them through the day – drugs at the work do just aren't worth it. If you absolutely must, hang on until everyone's shit-faced, do your thing, and then eventually think about seeking some sort of professional help because it sounds like your habit is turning into a problem.
DON'T TAKE CLASS A DRUGS WHILE YOUR FRIENDS ARE COOKING YOU CHRISTMAS DINNER
Have you ever had a pre-Christmas Christmas dinner with friends? It's a magical thing that becomes nigh-on impossible to organise as you get older. Think of it as like Christmas dinners with your family, except everyone gets on and nobody says anything problematic about Uber drivers.
If your host is taking a day out of their lives, at literally the busiest time of year, to pour sweat, care and tenderness into a lavish lunch, the likes of which you will never have the skills to create, don't turn up, drink three Tyskies and start on the gear you've got left over from the weekend.
If you do this and end up sitting there during lunch, not hungry, pushing potatoes around a plate and insisting that everyone listen to Head Automatica because you've just remembered you liked them when you were 15 and want everyone to know about it in detail, you are the worst and do not deserve the friends you have.
(Photo: Jake Lewis)
DO NOT INCLUDE WEED IN THAT PIECE OF ADVICE ABOVE
Little known fact: weed can make you hungry! Which helps when you have multiple plates full of starch doused in liquified animal fat to get through.
DON'T GET STUCK INTO CLASS A DRUGS ON CHRISTMAS EVE
During your twenties, Christmas Eve is the best night of the year: you go to the pub that used to serve you underage; you spot the man who has not moved from his bar stool in nearly two decades; you talk to a range of acquaintances from your childhood and everybody lies about not drinking too much so they're not hungover the next day. At 10PM you see an old fling; you ask about each other's parents and share a private joke from when you were together. It's not weird between you – you've both moved on; it's nice. That's the thing: Christmas Eve is nice, and though you do feel like shit the next morning, you and mum laugh about it – "Wouldn't be Christmas without a hungover Jerome!" – and by the time it gets to midday you're enthusiastically re-filling your Prosecco and showing your aunt how Tinder works.
So don't then fuck it all up by conspiring with your mates to get some "some bits" delivered to The Albion just before they ring the bell for last orders.
"When I was 21 I went out on Christmas Eve with my mates," says Dan, from Maidstone. "We weren't planning to get anything in, but at 10PM my dealer called saying he was in town and that he had some stuff. We were pissed by then so quartered a gram, but he also gave me a bunch of pills. 'Christmas present,' apparently. We ended up back at Stan's garage until 5AM. I was supposed to be helping with Christmas dinner the next day, but spent all day lying in bed with the worst comedown. My parents ignored me all day. Eight years later they still bring it up. Fair enough, really."
DO GIVE YOUR DEALER A BREAK OVER CHRISTMAS
Your dealer might have a mainline to the least adulterated "flake" in the South East (15 percent purity! Less than 90 percent cow worming medication!), but they also have a family. Leave them alone.
"You'd be surprised how many people call you on Christmas Day," says Simon, a small-time dealer based in Brighton. "It's always the ones who don't go back to families, and they call about 7PM, every time. They've done dinner and started getting properly drunk. They're always apologetic. I'm like: 'It's fine, I get it, but I am sitting here with my nan.'"
DON'T GIVE ANYTHING 'A TASTE' THE NIGHT BEFORE NYE
You'll be getting texts from Boxing Day telling you to get your orders in for NYE, and once you speak to a dealer they, of course, will try to make you pick up earlier.
The best approach is not to listen to them whatsoever. Do not buy drugs on the 30th of December. People do nothing but go to the pub on the 30th, and when they know there's a veritable pharmacy of mediocre drugs underneath their bedside lamp at home, the temptation to go back and "have a taste" is all-consuming. This, like every decision you make after a full day of drinking, is a terrible one.
The one where Willem Dafoe is running towards a helicopter that he’ll never catch. As his comrades fly away they see Dafoe running with a whole gang of enemies chasing him down and firing at him. Finally, where there is no hope, he falls to his knees, raises his arms to a deity that will never save him and lets the bullets rip through his body. Finally, thankfully, mercifully, one of the high-speed pieces of lead makes Willy Dafoe sleep forever.
That’s what the final month of 2017 feels like—a long run of bullshit that ends with more bullshit.
Happy holidays, fam. Photo via Screenshot.
To cope with this hell year, Canadians, along with people all over the world took to the ol’ internet machine, Google, for help. Google, being a massive corporation holding all of our secrets, released our most asked questions because corporations are fun, right!
The trending list are, as Google puts it, “based on search terms that had a high spike in traffic in 2017 compared to 2016.” Essentially this means if Canadians googled the shit out of you last year, you most likely won’t be on this list. This is why Justin Trudeau is missing and is also why he is most likely at his desk swigging from a bottle of Grand Marnier and weeping (digital love is Daddy Canada’s drug of choice.)
In it you can see some of the diets that Canadians researched, the memes we loved (which is topped by the Cash Me Ousside girl and United Airlines), international news (hurricanes, Trump and North Korea), and politicians (Trump, Singh, Scheer, Moore, Macron).
One of the bleakest sections outlines the top five people Canada googled in 2017. They are, in this order, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey, Éric Salvail, and Melania Trump. Now, you most likely know why the first three are on that list, but if you’re an Anglo-Canadian you probably don’t know Salvail. Well, Salvail is a Quebec radio personality that was let go in October for sexaul harrassment allegations—so, he’s in similar company on this list. Melania Trump is on there because… well, she’s Trump’s wife and is turning the White House into a goth kid’s holiday fueled wet dream.
Aside from us finding out that giving people unchecked power is a terrible thing, Google gives us the questions that we asked the most—and, boy howdy, did we ever ask some. Now, for the second year in a row, I’m going to do my best to answer these—they exist in no real order.
Q: Why are NFL players kneeling? (number one ‘why’ question)
A: OK guys, you need to get a little better at following the news. Simply put, the kneeling was started by Colin Kaepernick, a NFL quarterback who, in 2016, kneeled during the American anthem because he couldn’t support a system that systematically oppressed minorities. In 2017, the protest grew far larger than just Kaepernick with entire teams taking a knee during the anthem and the protest migrating to other sports.
Some make the argument that the narrative was stolen by people who made out the protest to be about Trump rather than the country as a whole. Trump, as he does, didn’t take this slight well and, uh, freaked the fuck out and fired tweet after tweet off attacking the league and players. Look, this is one of those ones I can go on and on about—here is an in-depth piece on it you can read if you want more.
Q: How do they name hurricanes? (number one ‘how’ question)
A: Well, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say they give storms short names because it facilitates easier communication and limits confusion. The actual naming of the storm is done by the the World Meteorological Organization who cycle through names on a yearly basis. If a storm, like Katrina, is so deadly or costly that the name becomes synonymous with one storm it is then retired.
A: As a man who suffers from depression rather frequently, I can tell you there is no real answer to this other than just being there for them—I’m glad Canadians are asking this question. As I said, there aren’t any definite answers but here are somelinksthatcanhelp.
A: Well, Catalonia, which is located on north-eastern tip of Spain, essentially has their own culture, and history—this area includes Barcelona. As always, money is a big reason for them wanting out—separatists want greater fiscal autonomy and hate paying subsidies to the rest of Spain. The drive has been going on in a serious manner since 2006 but it was reignited this year and on October 1, the area held a referendum. Violence broke out across the region because Spain who attempted to suppress the vote—however, 43 percent of the population were able to vote and they voted 90 percent in favour of becoming independent from Spain.
The situation is still ongoing and separatists face serious obstacles for their goal. Here is a story in which you can learn more about this.
Q: How to buy bitcoin in Canada?
A: Please tweet this question to my friend Jordan Pearson (@neuwaves), he would absolutely love to field this inquiry and won’t be mad at me at all for including this.
Q: How soon should you take a pregnancy test?
A: You should wait at least one or two weeks after you did the sex.
Q: Why are women marching?
A: OK, so I assume you’re referencing the women’s march that took place in January, shortly after President Pink Goo was sworn in. The marching happened all over the world on January 21 and millions took part.
Trump, who has been accused of sexual assault many, many times, ran a campaign targeting minorities including women. This march, which was essentially aimed at the president, was to advocate for human rights with a particular focus on women’s rights.
But given the year it’s been, it should be obvious why the women are marching.
Q: Why are there so many hurricanes?
A: Uhhhhhhhhhhh… OK, I’m going to do my best with this one (with some googling of my own that is.) So, 2017 was an ideal year for hurricane conditions. Three major things that played into this were the lack of the El Nino system, a pretty darn warm Atlantic ocean, and, of course, our old friend climate change.
A: Jesus Christ, seriously? I dunno, probably because you’re getting old and you’re going to die soon.
Q: Why doesn't Caillou have hair?
A: Cause that kid sucks...Actually, there is a legitimate answer to this. On their website, Chouette Publishing, the company that first published the books write that originally Caillou was a baby and, you know, babies are bald. So, when they made Caillou a little older they found that giving him hair made him “unrecognizable” and “decided that Caillou would never have any hair.”
“Caillou’s baldness may make him different, but we hope it helps children understand that being different isn’t just okay, it’s normal,” they explain.
Awwwwwwww.
Q: How often should you wash your hair?
A: If you actually googled this question, the answer is probably “more than you currently do.”
Q: Why are fidget spinners so popular?
A: Let me answer this question with one of my own. Have you ever read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?
Q: How many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?
A: Are you kidding me, guys? I’m out… I’m fucking done with this.
In a powerful essay for the New York Times, actor and producer Salma Hayek claimed disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein repeatedly sexually harassed her and tried to shutter one of her major films when she turned down his advances.
Before she broke out as a mainstream Hollywood star, Hayek said she approached Weinstein to pick up Frida, a biopic she wanted to star in and produce about Frida Khalo. Weinstein's production company, Miramax, bought the rights to the film, and Hayek said she was thrilled: "He had taken a chance on me—a nobody. He had said yes."
But soon, Hayek wrote, Weinstein repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances toward her. In her words, it became "my turn to say no":
No to opening the door to him at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location, where he would show up unexpectedly, including one location where I was doing a movie he wasn’t even involved with. No to me taking a shower with him. No to letting him watch me take a shower. No to letting him give me a massage. No to letting a naked friend of his give me a massage. No to letting him give me oral sex. No to my getting naked with another woman. No, no, no, no, no…
Hayek said rebuffing Weinstein's advances infuriated him so deeply that, ultimately, he threatened to kill her.
"The range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, 'I will kill you, don’t think I can’t,'" Hayek wrote.
Enraged at Hayek, Weinstein allegedly worked to shutter Frida, which Hayek had been working on for years. He threw her extreme demands, like raising $10 million, reworking the script, and getting A-list actors signed on under a short deadline. When Hayek managed to meet them, Weinstein allegedly threatened to shut down production on the film unless Hayek agreed to a sex scene with another woman, featuring full-frontal nudity. She unwillingly agreed, but grew so upset the day of the shoot that she broke down, crying, convulsing, and vomiting before filming.
"He had been constantly asking for more skin, for more sex," she wrote. She added, "The only thing he noticed was that I was not sexy in the movie. He made me doubt if I was any good as an actress, but he never succeeded in making me think that the film was not worth making."
The film went on to win two Oscars, and solidified Hayek as a major star in the movie industry. Now, she is just one of the many high-profile women to come forward accusing Weinstein of sexual harassment, adding her name to the list of more than 80 women who he allegedly terrorized for roughly three decades.
Last week, President Donald Trump announced that the United States now recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and will soon move its embassy to that city from Tel Aviv. This stance has been implicite US policy since Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act in 1995, and Israel has long had control of the city, and kept most of its government facilities there. But because Palestinians claim Eastern Jerusalem as their capital, and Arabs and Muslims the world over generally view the status of the city as a touchstone issue, most countries do not recognize the full city as Israel’s capital. Likewise, the last three American presidential administrations have quietly delayed moving the embassy there.
Trump’s proclamation didn’t change anything on the ground. That same day, in fact, he quietly signed a memo delaying official action on the embassy for at least six months, and probably longer. But his abstract recognition of Israeli control of the city and brash statement of intent read as a clear signal that the administration may not respect the Palestinian quest for sovereignty. And as anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the region might have predicted, it sparked a wave of protests across the world resulting in many injuries and at least four reported deaths in Palestine.
To gauge how seriously we should be concerned about elevated terrorist threats in the wake of Trump’s decision, VICE spoke to Thomas Sanderson, an expert on terrorism and terrorist threats at the Center for Strategic and International Studies with almost two decades of experience. Here’s what we talked about.
VICE: When you first heard Trump was going to make this announcement, what did you see as the most immediate outcome? Thomas Sanderson: That it would make ironclad assertions by violent extremists that the United States has no real interest in supporting statehood for the Palestinians—and it would send a broader signal that the United States was indeed an adversary to Muslims and Arabs. That’s an inescapable conclusion on the part of many people, not just extremist groups, who see any remnants of impartiality by the US on the subject of the Palestinian territories as having evaporated with that decision.
What did you expect to see in the short-term when it came to terrorist rhetoric or violence? I expected higher levels of violence, to be frank. That may yet come. But we have simply sharpened an arrow in the quiver of violent extremists. That arrow was already there, though.
I think there was already a lack of faith in America as a negotiator on the fate of Palestine throughout the region, though. So how potent is sharpening this arrow for terrorist groups, really? It doesn’t make a difference with those already dedicated to the goals of a group like al-Qaeda or [the Islamic State]. What it does is pull more people who were positioned closer to the middle in their disposition towards the United States. Those people who were still at play in an effort to convince them … that we are a force for good. [The extremists] are able to say, “See, those of you who were holding out on if the United States really is this evil power, here’s your proof.”
But America has been signaling its intention to move the embassy and recognize Jerusalem since at least 1995. How does that factor into the extent to which extremist groups can use Trump’s move to mobilize new followers? Do those people in the middle ground know it is a stated policy that has been delayed? And [in 1995], we were making clear progress towards the two state solution such that the suggestion of moving the embassy to Jerusalem would not be as inflammatory. Now, the declaration is in the absence of any real effort by the US to reach the solution that was being discussed in 1995.
So far, at least, we haven't seen a wave of terrorist violence many expected or alluded to. Why is that? I don’t know. I was surprised. But the fact that it hasn’t happened in the first week doesn’t mean that it’s not going to... This is a gift to many organizations. The fact that it has not been taken advantage of certainly suggests that something is coming, because how could you not take advantage of an opportunity like this if you are the type who would want to?
How long do you think security forces and intelligence units in the region and in the US should or will be on high alert for terrorist actions because of this? What’s the half-life? In the region, security forces will be on alert, and should be on alert, for months on end. You can act very quickly if you want, a low-level attack. But for something that makes a statement that a militant would find to be commensurate with the offense of announcing an embassy move, that would call for a greater planning period than three or four days.
What would such an individual or organization consider a commensurate response? In the minds of militants, a commensurate response would be something on a scale that most are not capable of performing: bombing an embassy, for example. Attacking an embassy in light of the US embassy planning to move to Jerusalem would be powerfully symbolic. It would result in fatalities among Americans. It would be a signal to the host nation that, “your partnership with the US is lethal.” But it is hard to do because of security precautions our embassies have taken. So it may push them to attack US tourists, US businesses, that are softer and easier to hit.
There has been some chatter that this move could negatively impact US counter-terror cooperation with Arab and Muslim allies in the region who opposed this move. The reality is, these countries will now find it more difficult to be supportive of counter-terrorism efforts in the absence of an impartial US disposition towards Muslims in Jerusalem.
Have you seen signs of these nations drawing away from cooperation because of this already? A decision like that would have to be taken with great care, because the US provides a great deal of intelligence of great value. Immediately pulling out of a relationship like that would bring any Muslim or Arab nation problems. That doesn’t mean we can do something like this willy-nilly because they have to partner with us anyway. You have to recognize, it’s now much harder for countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, or North African states to provide us with intelligence or cooperate with us overtly in counter-terrorism . Driving that cooperation into the shadows so a government does not suffer politically is not good. It complicates relationships.
What will you be keeping an eye on now that could portend further terror risk increases? The pace at which America moves forward with this decision… We’re not able to move the embassy tomorrow. If we did, it would be incredibly inflammatory.
I think the president made the declaration for short-term political gain, knowing the long-term execution of this policy would be so far down the road that the cost of making the declaration would not be too sharp at this point. There is a cost to it, the further tarnishing of the US reputation. But Trump knows that’s many years off, and could be reversed by the next president.
Not everyone finishes their post-university year out as an international ketamine smuggler. But then, having spent a couple of undergrad years buying in bags of pills for raves – both to facilitate the party and to ensure that he never ran out of his personal stash – "Gav" was well placed to sniff out a commercial opportunity in the narcotics sector.
Back in the mid-1990s, ketamine was still almost completely under the radar, on both sides of the law. "Your standard gangsters tend to be psycho wankers," says Gav. "They tried to muscle in on it but didn’t have a clue what they were doing. Even the language was different: litres not kilos, volume not weight." More importantly, because it was still classed under the Medicines Act rather than Misuse of Drugs, the police were equally clueless. "Someone I know got arrested with a load, in powder form, and they had to spell it out to them what it was. Literally spell the word out. A couple of weeks later the police phoned them up and said, 'You can come and collect your property.' That’s how legal it was – the police were giving it you back!"
Gav – whose name has been changed because he agreed to speak to VICE on the condition of anonymity – had come across K on the London squat party scene, buying a litre for around £500 in 1996, selling (most of) it on as 50 individual grams, for around £30 a hit. "Hardly big business," he recalls, "but a good boost to your income when you’re on the dole after university. Plus, your main expense for the weekend is paid for."
The first opportunity to upscale came when some friends went to Goa for a two-week break which eventually turned into a six-month stay. Back then – as is still the case today – India was the world's biggest producer of ketamine, manufacturing tons of the drug for legitimate medical and veterinary use. Unlike today, the drug was easily bought from factories and chemists. Gav's friends saw an opportunity, and asked Gav if he’d mind receiving a parcel from them. They gave him a litre for his troubles, which he found out had cost just £100 at source. "I said: 'That’s £2 a gram! Jesus, that’s a lot of mark-up! Do you want to go back? Can I come?!'" A month later he was on a plane with a friend, sourcing a cheap charter flight from Teletext.
In those halcyon early days it was all a new frontier, the ketamine trade very much a cottage industry. "At one time, pretty much the entire European supply came from one person, one tiny little shop at the side of the road in Goa," Gav recalls. "Somebody discovered you could buy it at the chemists and no one would ask any questions. It was being manufactured in Mumbai as an anaesthetic."
On those first trips, Gav and his start-up associate would buy "around a grand’s worth, maybe £1,500", sending back 10 to 15 litres via the tiny local DHL office. The K came in large boxes of sterile 10-millilitre vials, which would be opened and the contents painstakingly transferred to litre bottles of rosewater. "Getting the liquid out of glass vials and into the rosewater bottles was extremely time-consuming," says Gav. "It was an absolute mission in the early days – you’d end up with both your hands bleeding. Getting the liquid in a cut hand was really fucking painful – quite ironic for a painkiller, really."
No one was entirely certain why rosewater bottles were used to smuggle the liquid ketamine back to the UK, but Gav had a theory: "I didn’t invent the whole rosewater thing – it was always a bit mysterious who did. But it said on the bottle that it was used for various things, including 'religious purposes'. This meant there was no import tax on it, so it was never stopped at customs. Winner!"
Once the bottling and delivery had been taken care of, next there was waste disposal to consider, which could at times become quite slapstick: "You can’t just throw it all in the bin, because it’s all quite incriminating. So you’ve got to find a way to get rid of this rubbish. Someone found a big hole in the ground somewhere – an unfinished construction site in the middle of the jungle. You’d drive off the road and turn your moped headlights off, because you didn’t want anyone to see what you were doing. You can’t see anything – not just because it’s dark, but because you’re off your head as well – and you’re lugging this big hessian sack full of tiny glass bottles, in the jungle, in the dark, while high, with monkeys and snakes to contend with, looking for a big hole in the ground, which was also dark, and you’re trying not to fall down the hole yourself – no pun intended. It was helpful when there was a good moon, actually."
Initially, everything save the bottling was taken care of at night, and that was usually done in guest houses away from the tourist area, where police circled looking for easy bribes. "We thought it was more undercover doing it all at night: the ferrying, the dumping, whatever. Actually, we realised you were much better off doing it in the morning, because people don’t think you’re doing anything dodgy in the morning. And there’s no police around."
Meanwhile, logistics at the UK end of operations boiled down to finding people willing to accept parcels. "In the early days it was low risk," remembers Gav. "You could do it in one parcel, to one address. Ten to 15 litre bottles. You can take the odd hit because the outlay wasn’t great, but as things went on you started to spread the risk by having multiple recipients."
As things scaled up, not only was Gav paying people to receive parcels – either in money or drugs, preferably the latter – but also to find him addresses, ensuring all his eggs weren’t in one basket. "At the start, it was all going to the same town, but by the end it was going all over the country. Some who I’d met, some who I hadn’t." With so many people living in rented accommodation with a high turnover of tenants, it was relatively easy to alight upon the golden combination of fictional name at real address. And as long as his recipients didn’t open it, they were fine: "Until you’ve opened it, you’re not responsible for what’s inside it, even if it’s in your name," says Gav.
Because of the relative novelty of the drug, and the fact that the majority of the supply was being funnelled into the London squat party scene or being taken out on the European Teknival circuit, Gav had cornered a market: "In the part of the country I was from, there was only us doing it. It was all mainly London. This paid off for me quite well. Their cops were better, more on the case, so if it was ever going to go wrong, it was going to go wrong in London. And if it was bad there, then it was time to knock it on the head. But then it didn’t go bad – for about ten years."
While things were going well, Gav reflects that it wasn’t as easy as it sounds, particularly not for the sort of people naturally drawn towards it as a career option. "Lots of people were terrible at it. They either spent all the money or sniffed all the drugs. You need a certain amount of willpower. It’s like filling up your wine rack and sitting there and not drinking it. Easier said than done. Especially when you’ve got small quantities. So, either don’t get high on your own supply, or have too much supply to be able to do any damage to it."
In order to get to the hallowed too-much-supply stage, scaling things up from those first exploratory incursions, Gav realised he would have to increase the cash flow (and even then there would be limits to how many 10-millilitre vials you could physically open before your bleeding hands protested). Initially, he raised cash from sponsors – people who would give him £250 up front, get a litre back, and allow him to buy two-and-a-half at source – but he quickly tired of the hassle he was getting from sketchy people who feared he might have done a runner. Dragons' Den it was not.
The game changer came when Gav was offered a credit card, simply by virtue of having graduated in the previous 12 months: "You didn’t even need a job or anything, which was handy." He started to live on the credit while in England and build up reserves of "folding money" to take on his increasingly frequent business trips to India, the profit from which would then pay off the card. The activity on his account didn’t escape the benevolent eye of the automated banking system, which duly increased his overdraft facility. He soon started to open other bank accounts, growing the overdraft limit until they, too, offered him a credit card. Eventually, he got to the stage where, once a week, he would simply move the money round in a big circle, paying off one card with another, then the next with another, round and round, making sure he always left each account a minimum of a penny overdrawn, the combination of regular use and permanent debt making each account attractive to the banks, to the point where he built up £21,000 of credit on one card alone. The business took off.
Gav was making approximately 200 percent profit on each trip – £100 cost price per litre, wholesaled at £300 back in the UK to two regular dealers – but as growth became exponential he still had to get hard currency into India. "Obviously you can’t really use credit cards over there. You wouldn’t have to be the world’s cleverest detective to work that one out after looking at the statement."
WATCH: How to Use Ketamine as Safely as Possible
On a number of occasions Gav took £20,000 through different airports, squeezed into the side pockets of his combat trousers. "I got very good at not setting off metal detectors at airports," he recalls. "I’d do things like buy plastic belts so I didn’t have to take my belt off, because your combat trousers would sag a little bit with £20,000 stuffed in the side pockets. You didn’t want to get padded down, because if you did they’d say, 'What’s that big lump there?'"
Once in India, there was the problem of changing the wad of £50 notes to rupees, which involved calling the exchange shops from pay phones and asking what the maximum amount they could change without ID was ("usually around five or six hundred quid"), then going round them, one by one. While "the Indians loved their £50 notes", they weren’t able to reciprocally furnish their British customers with high denominations. "If you go to India now, getting a 1,000 rupee note's not a problem. It was worth about £20. But you wouldn’t get one then. You’d be really lucky to get a 500 rupee note, and quite lucky to get a hundred. You’d get stuck with loads of fifties, which weren’t even worth a pound. The notes were worth nothing. People used to use 10 rupee notes as wraps to put their K for the night in. So in the middle period, when we were doing around 50 litres per trip, you were taking 5,000 of these notes. We ended up with rucksacks full of money. One time, me and a friend filled up a wardrobe with money and it took us all day to move it to the chemist, driving backwards and forwards. It was ridiculous."
Eventually, this problem was solved when "something changed behind the scenes there" and the Indians started accepting British currency. Not only that, the bottling was now getting done for them, too. The local economy was adapting.
Although Gav never entirely discovered what had happened, he suspects that two restaurateur brothers who first coined the phrase "English omelette" for K – on account of the visitors’ habit of cooking the liquid down to powder in frying pans – had muscled in and set themselves up as middle men. A mysterious figure also started to operate out of the DHL office – "Basically, they didn’t like people going down there all the time, as there was always a massive queue of people outside all doing the same thing: sending rosewater back to the UK for religious purposes!" – while people were even coming to the hotel to collect their list of names and addresses in the UK. "It got to the stage where you didn’t even see the stuff."
As the logistics became easier, so the entrepreneurial psychonauts were scaling up to industrial levels: "A chemist once said to me, ‘When you lot first turned up, someone asked if I could do 20 litres and I didn’t know whether I could fill the order. It took me ages to sort it out. Now, everyone who walks in my shop buys 200.'"
Consequently, what had been fairly inconspicuous was now out in the open: "When I first went over there it was a very small group of us – quite poor, quite messy people, basically stumbling around getting our thing done, with the bonus that no one knew what we were doing because it was on such a small scale. And we didn’t used to talk to anyone, probably because we were far too fucked to speak half the time. Advantageous, I suppose. When you’re lying on the floor dribbling, it’s quite hard to give away what you’re up to. But later on it got to the point where people who wouldn’t have ever dreamed of selling you a teenth of hash were off on a K-run to India.
"It got to the stage where any old idiot could do it. It used to be two to three weeks, and I’d make £2,000. Then it became three days. By then you’ve done the jet-skis, the paragliding, hired the speedboats, the taste of the local beer had got so bad you started making shandy, so you’d end up watching BBC News on loop in your hotel room, sticking your head in the fridge to snort coke you’d bought off some Nigerians just as the air-con had stopped working, because otherwise it would dissolve in the humidity. I’d spend more time waiting for the flight home than doing anything useful."
At the peak of operations, Gav was making "about two grand a week", tax-free, one from each of his two main dealers, ensuring that he kept wholesale prices low so they could make a tidy profit and thus pay him. Sound husbandry. But the boom years were now over and decadence was setting in. "You get too many people doing it, it becomes too well known, and then just collapses."
It was around 2004, Gav recalls, when "it became obvious things were getting worse". People were being stopped by Indian immigration on their way out of the country, while there were hiccups in the UK, too. Monitoring the DHL tracking system – which told you exactly when a parcel had landed and when it had cleared customs – Gav noticed that what had for five years taken about five minutes suddenly increased to two weeks.
Other weird things were happening, too: "A guy from DHL dropped off a parcel at someone’s house and said: 'Look, it’s none of my business, but there are a load of police around the corner.' Then parcels were coming through wrapped up in yellow-and-black tape: 'Opened for inspection: Customs and Excise', it would say. And the odd bottle was disappearing – maybe it was falling out of the boxes, but we were convinced that people in the delivery company had cottoned on and were just nicking it. No one’s ever going to complain, are they?"
If it was something of an act of serendipity that got the whole ball rolling, then in the end it was an act of hubris that brought it all down. "There was this Italian guy who started putting liquid cocaine into rosewater bottles and sending it back. He got busted and that’s when the police got interested. They looked at the record of what was coming through and were convinced they’d uncovered some massive coke-smuggling factory. It wasn’t. It was just this one guy who ended up in prison for ages – good, really, because he fucked things up for everyone."
Gav remembers reading a line in Howard Marks’ autobiography Mr Nice at the outset of it all. "It said something like, 'Don’t try and do it this way because it doesn’t work like this any more.' Well, it’s the same for K: unfortunately, it won’t work like this any more."
Her name is Suria-Ann Johns, she’s 24 years old, and she lives in Prince George, British Columbia. She says she was the using the long-as-hell movie as a way to fall asleep.
“I was pregnant, and the only place I was comfortable sleeping was on my couch... I can’t fall asleep unless I have some sort of white noise going on,” Johns told VICE.
Johns said she streamed the extended version of the film—which runs even longer than the original at just over four hours and 23 minutes—one to three times per night once her “belly started getting big” during her pregnancy. She now has a three-month old baby and is a stay-at-home mom.
“I just think it is really well-written, and the characters are hilarious,” Johns said. She mentioned how since the film is so long, it meant she didn’t have to click the “continue watching” button as often on Netflix. She also said she watched it sometimes during the day.
Netflix unfortunately only shows the latest instance of when you watched something on your viewing history, so we were unable to confirm the number of times Johns has watched the film via her account. We have also reached out to Netflix and will update this article if we hear back.
Here are some things Johns said she noticed after watching the film an extensive number of times: “When King of Rohan’s son died, his niece ended up singing at his funeral—and I never noticed that before,” and, she said, “Saruman’s death, he fell to his death—I didn’t ever notice that.” [Editor’s note: Saruman, aka Saruman the White, had his death scene cut from the original theatrical version of Return of the King.]
Johns said she tried reading The Lord of the Rings books when she was 12 years old but found them “too complicated” at the time and is way more into the movies.
She said she’s watched the other LOTR films an excessive number of times as well, but not as much as Return of the King.
As for the overwrought oliphaunt killing scene in ROTK—which we wondered about in our original article—Johns has some words about that.
“I love the battle one. I think it’s hilarious when Gimli and Legolas are fighting to see how many orcs and bad guys they can kill, and Legolas takes down four or five men on top of the oliphaunt! Then he takes down the oliphaunt, and Gimli just kind of glares at him,” she said. “Éowyn, she stabs the [Witch King of Angmar] in the face and says, ‘I am no man!’... I think that was a great scene.”
“As for the oliphaunt on top of the hill, I don’t really think that was necessary,” Johns explained. “I think that was just a waste of time and money.”
So are there any other Netflix offerings Johns finds herself repetitively binging on?
“Family Guy,” she said, “I’ve seen every episode on Netflix many times.”
Growing up, I remember the rush I got watching commercials for McDonald’s, Gushers, and more than anything else, SunnyD. The latter, for the uninitiated, is an orange-juice knockoff that tastes like it’s made of oil, sugar, and food colouring. But the marketing really sucked me in.
Soon Canadian kids may never know the joy of singing along to the Lucky Charms jingle (“they’re magically delicious”). Not if a new bill aimed at banning food and beverage marketing targeted at children passes into law.
The Child Health Protection Act, an amendment to Canada’s Food and Drugs Act, stipulates “no person shall advertise unhealthy food in a manner that is directed primarily at children.” Children is defined as people aged 17 and under.
The bill, put forth by Conservative Senator (and former Olympian) Nancy Greene Raine and backed by Liberal MP Doug Eyolfson, was given second reading in the House of Commons this week. It says the increase in Canada’s childhood obesity rates, which have tripled in the last three decades, is a national concern.
According to the bill, “the protection of vulnerable children from the manipulative influence of marketing of food and beverages is predicated on a pressing and substantial concern and calls for a federal legislative response.”
The maximum penalties for disobeying the proposed rules would be a fine of $50,000 or six months in jail for a summary conviction or a fine of $250,000 or three years in jail for an indictable offence.
“Everyone understands how impressionable children are,” said Greene Raine on her website. According to the National Post, she also said “When you have servers bending down to speak to a seven-year-old and say ‘I have a special card for you and when you get 10 punches you get a toy,’ that’s not right. It’s an enticement for the child to put pressure on the parent.”
Obviously childhood obesity poses many health risks, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. But why is it in Canada our first instinct is to ban everything?
It doesn’t take a nutritionist to realize that things like Happy Meals aren’t healthy, so imposing a full on ban of advertising is could be construed as patronizing to parents, if you think about it. On the other hand, I don’t have kids so I don’t know what it's like to deal with a Happy Meal-related meltdown.
But at the end of the day, if a parent wants to feed their kids fast food all the time, no advertising ban is going to change that.
Thinking back to the first time you heard about Bitcoin is probably painful, and not just because it might conjure up memories of the dreadlocked white dude you went to college with who knew what was good with the dark web. The most gut-wrenching fact about this so-called cryptocurrency is that you'd be rich as hell right now had you actually listened to that loathsome (and unlikely) financial adviser. In the past year alone, the price of BTC multiplied by double digits; last week, prices soared from $11,000 to $17,000. To put that in real terms, remember that guy who made news for buying two pizzas with Bitcoin back in 2010? Had he held onto the Bitcoin and shelled out regular cash, he'd be well over $100 million richer today.
Predictably, this news and its attendant promise of easy money has made Americans go insane. As CNBC reported Monday, citing an Alabama securities regulator, people are actually taking out mortgages to invest in Bitcoin, perhaps hoping to turn $20,000 into their entire retirement fund. Meanwhile, the phrase "buy Bitcoin with credit card" was at least recently trending on Google. These are tempting gambles given that pensionless people (a.k.a. millennials) run the risk of spending all their savings before they die. But are they ones you should take?
It depends who you ask, of course. That guy from college is probably a millionaire, along with the neck-bearded libertarian-type you knew back then. Meanwhile, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, once described by the New York Times Magazine as America's least-hated banker, called Bitcoin a "fraud" as recently as September. To figure out if I was missing out on the financial opportunity of a lifetime, I called Angela Walch, a law professor at St. Mary's University in Texas who studies cryptocurrency and financial stability. Here's what we talked about.
VICE: OK, first of all, why has the price of Bitcoin exploded so much in the past year, particularly in the past few weeks? Angela Walch: I'm not sure anybody really knows, but it does seem to have caught everyone's imagination. From my perspective, I think there's a lot of speculation going on here. Particularly, there's this kind of weird thing happening where Bitcoin's original selling point was that it was going to be this kind of easy payment application where you can pay anyone anywhere in the world directly without having to deal with a middle man. And as the price has risen, and as the network has gotten clogged with too many transactions, that payment application doesn't really seem to be working anymore. So people have changed their way of talking about it to describe it as a crypto-asset. And people are buying it because they think it's going to have higher value in the future. So it's just a cycle of people thinking they're gonna buy it now, and someone else is going to be willing to buy it later from them for more. To me that sounds like a speculative bubble, but there is a core contingent of people who believe that as some point Bitcoin will be used for everything—they call it "hyperbitcoinization."
The way you're describing it, it sounds like people are treating Bitcoin like a collectable comic book more than a currency. Absolutely. It's interesting to me if anyone is actually spending it instead of trading it. Like, "I'm going to cash in on some of my gains by selling it to someone who's going to get in now." Using it to pay for anything doesn't make any sense if you believe it's going to go up in price.
How does what's happening with Bitcoin hew to the classic definition of a speculative bubble? Some of the hallmarks to me involve the FOMO idea—the fear of missing out and never being able to get in. People see other people making a lot of money and they just want in on it. The housing bubble is a good example of that. People thought another person would always want to buy their house from them at a higher price.
The other thing that makes it look like a bubble to me is the way people are talking about it. If you watch any of the CNBC, Bloomberg type shows, people are just saying, "Wow, how high can it go!" The media just continues to talk it up, and the people that the media interview are, too. It's fascinating to me that we can continue to be seized by manias at any given time. And people keep saying, "This time is different. It's not a bubble."
I'm skeptical that it is different. Another feature of a bubble is the failure of people to understand what they're investing in at all. They forgo that. People are making money, so they just want to jump in. They don't know the history of Bitcoin. They don't understand the scalability issues. They don't understand the mining centralization issues. But they see other people doing it.
It almost sounds like the dot com bubble is the more apt comparison in that all the traditional precautions of investing are being thrown out the window—people don't even take the time to understand what they're investing in, they just think it sounds good. Yes, the dot com bubble I see as applicable because all you had to do was throw "dot com" on the end of a company name and have no business plan and no profits to get people to throw money at it. A lot of other cryptocurrencies are riding the coattails of Bitcoin, and people are rushing to those, too. As long as it's "crypto," you see hedge fund managers putting their money in. It's a trend.
It's similarly comparable to the housing bubble due to the failure of financial institutions to appreciate risk, as we've seen, with subprime mortgages being packaged up into mortgage-backed securities, so that everyone could have access to assets that were thought to only be able to increase in value. I'm worried that we're creating structures that mimic that, and that the futures we're creating, which will lead to [exchange-traded funds], which will come to rely on the one underlying asset of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, which are moving targets and not an asset that can support that kind of structure built on top of them.
To back up, how does something end up on the futures exchange to begin with? Does someone make an arbitrary decision, or does the asset have to hit a threshold of worth? Because Bitcoin's value has gone up so much in the past year, there has been a demand from traditional financial sector players to be able to access it as an investment. Since the financial crisis, it's been hard to make big returns on stuff. Cryptocurrency has been area with a big return, but to participate in that big return, you had to be willing to navigate the extremely poor user interface for cryptocurrencies, and deal with all these huge risks. It's not easy. So [these traditional financial types] want to be able to access this stuff through intermediaries or parties they're used to dealing with. So I think the [the futures exchange CBOE in Chicago] saw some opportunity to make some money by offering a really in-demand product to their customers. I'm skeptical they understand the risks of what they're doing.
By risks, are you referring to the volatility of markets or susceptibility of cryptocurrencies to hackers? There are many of them. Volatility, sure. Hacks on them, too. It's a purely software-based asset, so it sounds very basic, but having bugs in the software [is a concern].
People are allegedly starting to take out mortgages to buy Bitcoin. Can you explain to someone who might be thinking about doing this why it's a really bad idea? I saw that headline, and that really frightened me, because taking out debt to invest is how people end up getting into trouble. That was at the heart, in many ways, of the financial crisis. People thought their investments could only go up, and when they went down, they couldn't pay back the debt. If enough people do that and can't pay back their debt that they borrowed to buy Bitcoin, the lenders can eventually be affected by that, and it can just spiral through the system.
Cryptocurrency was developed as an alternative to traditional financial institutions. If and when the government tries to regulate it, will people lose interest? Or will it stabilize in some way? The Commodities Futures Trading Commission has oversight over Bitcoin futures. They're expecting to monitor it very carefully for market manipulation, which I think there is a very high likelihood of that in the existing Bitcoin exchange system. The IRS has said that Bitcoin is essentially property, and so if you've realized any gains from it, you need to pay taxes on it. As the gains get bigger, the tax authorities will become incentivized. They're not gonna forgo that money. It's a bit confusing to me what the SEC is doing—they're definitely looking at initial coin offerings. But it's almost as if they've grandfathered in Bitcoin and Ethereum, which is interesting, because the distinction between them and the [currencies having] initial coin offerings is that they've been around for longer, and maybe they seem more familiar, but they're similar in many ways to what people are doing with [these newer cryptocurrencies].
I see every regulator having a little piece of this. But I'm interested in who's keeping track of the systemic implications of this. And I'm hoping people are, but I guess that would come through something like the Financial Stability Oversight Council, or the Financial Stability Board, or those types. I'm hoping we'll hear more from them. However, you can warn people about systemic risks, but you can't necessarily make people change their behaviors. Especially if each individual thinks that they're the one who's gonna make the money here, and who cares about everyone else.
Doug Jones's shocking upset of Roy Moore in the Alabama special Senate election was arguably a narrow victory. If the accusations that Moore preyed on teenaged girls hadn't surfaced a month before the election, if Moore hadn't already put some Republicans off by saying homosexuality should be illegal and Muslims shouldn't serve in Congress, if roughly 21,000 people (fewer than the number of write-in ballots) had voted differently, Moore might well have lost. But the failure of a Republican to win in Alabama against a pro-choice Democrat should serve as a sign—the kind with big flashing lights you can see from miles away—that the Republican Party, as currently constructed, is flirting with disaster.
The chief problem the GOP faces is that it has nowhere to go but down. Republicans dominate all three branches of government and completely control 26 state governments thanks to years of hard-fought victories funded in part by billionaires and supported by voter suppression. In 2010, a wave of electoral victories at the state level gave Republicans the chance to redraw congressional districts to their advantage after the Census, which seven years later has translated into a structural advantage in the House of Representatives; Democrats have to win a lot more votes than Republicans in order to take back Congress's lower chamber. In 2016, the Republicans maintained their narrow majority in the Senate even though their candidates got fewer votes than Democrats, a result that can be at least partially chalked up to the way the system favors rural voters and low-population states. And, of course, Donald Trump won the presidency despite getting about 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.
Single-party rule is not the norm in American politics; in particular, midterms are generally bad for whatever side controls the White House. It seems obvious that sooner or later, control of Congress and some statehouses will flip because that's just what tends to happen. But Trump and Trumpism looks increasingly likely to make this coming swing of the pendulum more disastrous for the GOP than it had to be.
Trump campaigned not as a traditional Republican but as a hell-raising populist who promised to work on behalf of "the forgotten men and women," to quote his inaugural address. In practice, he's promoted the most radical members of his party—including budget chief Mick Mulvaney and Attorney General Jeff Sessions—and pushed discriminatory measures like his "travel ban" targeting Muslims and his (so-far) failed effort to stop trans people from enlisting in the military. He's also continued his hell-raising, picking fights with whatever culture war target is closest to hand, especially women and especially black people and especially black athletes protesting police brutality.
Anecdotal evidence suggests his supporters appreciate this sort of fighting spirit. But there aren't many places where Trumpistas are in the clear majority. In this year's Virginia gubernatorial race, a Trump-like rabble-rouser named Corey Stewart, whose main issue was defending Confederate heritage, narrowly lost in the GOP primary to establishment figure Ed Gillespie. When Gillespie took a page from the Trump playbook in the general election, running ads that tied Democrat Ralph Northam to the notorious Central American gang MS-13, Northam ended up winning handily. (Gillespie says he regrets having felt compelled to air those ads, for whatever that's worth.)
In Alabama, Moore was the fringe figure, winning a primary against incumbent Luther Strange despite the latter candidate enjoying a (lukewarm) endorsement from Trump. Just as Gillespie embraced race-baiting, the national GOP embraced Moore despite lots of evidence that he was a sexual predator. Far-right Fox News host Sean Hannity declined to denounce Moore, the Republican National Committee started funding his campaign again after signaling it would cut him off, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went from calling on Moore to drop out to saying the voters should decide.
Well, the voters did decide, and it turns out there is a limit to the amount of toxicity that Republicans will put up with. (Exit polls indicate that Moore won handily among conservatives, but got only 25 percent of the self-identified moderate group.) The Trumpist strategy of attacking and attacking and attacking in the wake of every controversy and stumble worked in 2016—barely. As Moore's case shows, it's far from a sure thing.
Then there's the problem of Trumpism's actual policies—when they exist at all. In large part, the president has pursued a regular Republican agenda of slashing regulations and working to reduce taxes on the wealthy and corporations while cutting the social safety net. People do not like this: The healthcare bill that failed to pass earlier this year was historically unpopular, and the GOP tax plan that appears headed to passage as soon as this week is disliked by 49 percent of people who know about it and backed by only 31 percent, according to one recent poll. The "populist" plans that were supposed to set Trump apart from his Republican primary opponents are AWOL; his infrastructure plan in particular appears to be vaporware.
That is going to result in a GOP increasingly dominated by men like Moore, who naturally ape Trump's extremist style, or like Gillespie, who are willing to put it on for show. But Trumpism, with all its bluster, conflict-seeking behavior, and overt bigotry, is just not what many millions of Americans actually want. In every special election since 2016, the Democrats have outperformed the Republicans:
The GOP's highest-profile victory of the year, it's worth noting, was when Karen Handel beat Jon Ossoff in Georgia's Sixth Congressional District—and Handel was a mainstream Republican who appeared to identify with Trump as little as possible. Not all Republicans will be able to run that kind of campaign, especially when they've personally endorsed the president or voted for his policies.
It's impossible to say what will happen in the midterms, which are still nearly a year and a whole lot of news cycles away. And Republican candidates won't just dry up and blow away—a great deal depends on how effectively the Democrats can keep their base energized and convince swing voters to trust them. But it's obvious that Trump is remaking the GOP in his own image, and that's going to make winning elections a lot easier for his enemies.
In an upset that surprised nearly every pundit and election watcher (though not all of us), Doug Jones won Tuesday's Alabama Senate special election by a narrow but definitive margin (50 to 48 percent). Though many pundits were quick to claim this was somehow a victory for the Republican Party or a fluke, this election was far from that. With Democrats increasingly likely to hold most or all of their Senate seats (due to Trump’s unpopularity and incumbency advantage), Democrats need to pick up only two seats to win the Senate. Nevada and Arizona offer them good pickup opportunities, with Tennessee and Texas also possible, depending on the environment. A Democratic Senate could block Donald Trump’s agenda and weaken his ability to ram through unqualified judges.
Here are some key takeaways from the race:
1. Doug Jones Wasn’t Hurt by Being a Progressive
First, though pundits continuously claimed that abortion would drag Doug Jones down, there’s little evidence that for that. As I’ve noted before, Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) data suggest a majority of Alabamians who are not white evangelicals support abortion choice. Since any Democratic coalition will involve combining voters of color and white non-evangelicals, there’s just not much to gain from being anti-choice. Across the country, individuals who are not white evangelicals support abortion choice 68 percent to 33 percent. In only one state (Utah) in which the majority of individuals who are not white evangelicals oppose choice.
Further, parties are increasingly sorted along the lines of choice, so there is little to gain from moving to the center. The chart below shows the share of respondents from each party who “always” support abortion choice according to the American National Election Studies, which gives respondents four options on supporting abortion choice, from “always” to “never.”
There are other widespread misconceptions about policy: While elites see cutting Social Security as a “moderate” or “centrist” position, voters certainly do not: Only 3 percent of Democrats, 5 percent of independents, and 9 percent of Republicans support cutting Social Security. Meanwhile, 66 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of independents, and 51 percent of Republicans support increasing Social Security, according to the American National Elections Study (the rest said they would keep spending the same).
A pro-choice, pro-immigrant, pro-healthcare, and pro–Social Security politician just won an election in Alabama. There’s no reason Democrats shouldn’t be running these candidates elsewhere.
2. Democrats Need to Fight for Voting Rights
Second, it’s also worth noting that thousands of Alabamians had their voting rights restored and were registered to vote for the election by the NAACP (see this powerful video). Democrats have been slow to realize how central the long-term suppression of voting rights is to their electoral success. According to data from CCES, voters preferred Hillary Clinton 48 percent to 46 percent, while non-voters preferred her 53 percent to 44 percent. Democratic donors, activists, and organizers should invest in ballot initiatives to restore voting rights and pass automatic voter registration across the country.
It’s good to see a rights restoration ballot initiative happening in Florida. Had Democrats been able to travel back in time and do it before the turn of the century, they would have won the 2000, 2004, and possibly the 2016 presidential elections; millions would have Medicaid because they would have won the 2010 gubernatorial election; and Senator Bill Nelson wouldn’t be sweating his 2018 reelection. Better late than never, I suppose. Across the country, Democrats need to understand that no amount of television ads can mobilize people who are legally barred from voting.
3. A Good Campaign Can Turn a Loss into a Win
While campaigns can’t do much to persuade, the best research suggests that they can mobilize their voters. Jones really was able to increase turnout among his key voters, while Moore’s lack of campaign appearances, ads, and get-out-the-vote hurt him. In an election this close, that made the difference. A win like this is impossible without a surge in black voting, and data indicatethat black turnout drove a Jones victory. The Democratic Party lost the 2016 election because it did not understand the threat that voter suppression posed to them and did not invest in mobilizing black voters. If Ossoff had mobilized black turnout the way Jones did, he would have probably won his congressional election against Karen Handel.
4. Young Voters Matter
In doing the analysis for my last VICE piece, one thing I noticed is that the trend of young voters being more liberal was pretty consistent across states. Even in a deep-red place like Alabama, the young population leans Democratic. In Alabama, exit polling shows that individuals under 45 overwhelmingly supported Jones, while older voters went strongly for Moore. While it’s plausible exit polls overstate these divides, CCES data suggest that under-45s preferred Clinton 49 percent to 48 percent while over-45s preferred Trump 63 percent to 33 percent. Among only whites, the divide was 30 percent Clinton/66 percent Trump for under-45s, compared with 16 Clinton/82 percent Trump among over-45s.
5. Scandal Will Drag Down Republicans in 2018
Many commentators are treating Roy Moore as a one-off, but it’s unlikely he’ll be the only candidate brought down by the weight of his own controversies. It’s perfectly plausible that a scandal-plagued or incompetent candidate will make it through a Republican primary.
According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, there are 305 Democratic women running for the House in 2018, compared with only 69 Republican women. There are 201 Democratic women challenging an incumbent, compared with just 26 Republican women. It is likely that the next Republican congressional delegation will have a lower share of women than the current one. That means Republicans face a much higher risk of sexual assault or harassment scandals. The unprecedented corruption of the Trump administration will likely create several more.
On the Democratic side, EMILY’s list will be helping women like Gina Ortiz Jones of Texas and Mai Khanh Tran of California across the finish line. That could very well create a “scandal gap,” between the parties which will likely have massive electoral consequences. In Alabama, women went for Jones 57 percent to 41 percent (men favored Moore 56 to 42, and Moore won white women 34 to 63). If women swing towards Democrats, Republicans will have a difficult time finding a way to gerrymander women voters to maintain their House majority.
6. The Resistance to Trump Is Real
And it shows in the huge turnout differential we saw yesterday. Across the country, Democratic voters are more engaged then they’ve been since the 2008 election of Barack Obama. That means higher quality recruitment, more volunteers, more money, more attention, and higher turnout. It means we’re going to see surprise and unpredictable House losses across the country. Look to Jim Oberstar in 2010. Prior to losing to a first-time Tea Party candidate, the Democrat had won at least 60 percent of the vote in every election since 1992. If 2018 is anything like 2010 in reverse, there will be some major upsets like that. For instance, recent polling suggests that Paul Ryan is within 6 points of his upstart challenger.
The Alabama election, despite its oddities, is a signal of things to come. Trump’s unpopularity and the unpopularity of the Republican tax plan will drag them down in 2018. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is currently targeting 91 GOP-held districts, and while it’s unlikely they’ll win even a majority of these, they only need 24 to win a majority. Primaries will roil the GOP, leading them to put forward unpopular and scandal-plagued candidates.
But Democrats can only win if they seize the moment. That means running progressives who can energize the base, not milquetoast moderates. They need to fight back against the structural white supremacist voter suppression built into American politics that holds them back. They need to energize young voters and invest in getting out the vote. And for fuck’s sake, in a year when female voters will determine the fate of the country, stop running candidates who want to deny women the right to control their own bodies.
Sean McElwee is a researcher and writer based in New York. Follow him on Twitter.
The head writers on Saturday Night Live have always been heavy hitters—Seth Myers, Tina Fey, Adam McKay, you name it—but in the show's 42-year history, not once has person of color occupied the top spot. Until now.
On Tuesday, NBC promoted Michael Che to the position along with his "Weekend Update" co-host, Colin Jost, Vulture reports. Che and Jost will serve as co-head writers, alongside the existing head writers, Bryan Tucker and Kent Sublette.
Jost and Che teamed up for "Weekend Update" back in 2014, where Che—who had a run on The Daily Show in Jon Stewart's day—has delivered some pretty sharp commentary. His segment on President Trump's response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico was particularly strong; a clip of the segment has more than 2 million views on YouTube.
Che has also had some success writing other hit sketches for SNL, including an episode of "Black Jeopardy" featuring Tom Hanks as a white, MAGA hat–wearing Southerner who winds up finding some common ground with his fellow contestants and the host, played by Keenan Thompson. The Washington Post lauded the bit as SNL's "best political sketch this year."
According to Vanity Fair, the move follows the exit of head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, who left the show last summer after one successful season. The show saw a nice ratings spike under what VF called the duo's "sharp, progressive, female-fronted millennial humor," so it'll be interesting to see how the show maintains that streak now that all its head writers are men. Che has gotten flack for sexist comments in the past and even addressed his unpopularity among white, liberal women in a sketch in which he impersonates one.
This isn't Jost's first turn as a head writer for SNL, having worked the job from 2012–2015 before stepping down to focus on "Weekend Update." The foursome will have their work cut out for them, following a standout season marked by Melissa McCarthy's Spicer impression, Alec Baldwin's take on Trump, and a shit-ton of Emmys.
The dreidel was the first thing about my Jewish heritage that ever made me feel "cool." Sometime in between the slap bracelet and the fidget spinner, I brought 50 of them to my middle school for show and tell and they caught on like wildfire. It was a perfect storm. The dreidels were pocket-size and brightly colored. Smartphones weren't a thing yet, so my friends still needed help killing time between classes. Although the trend faded as quickly as it came, for one incredible week I had 150 tween gentiles transfixed by the little Jewish tops. Ever since dreezy season commenced, I've been trying to figure out how to recapture those glory days.
While the dreidel is often thought of as a children's game, millennials are getting in touch with their inner "kidults" more than ever these days. Which means this might be the perfect moment for me to bring the dreidel back... with an adult twist. Lots of booze. My new goal: create the most entertaining (and intoxicating) form of dreidel imaginable.
According to Jeffery Shandler, a Yiddish studies PhD who chairs the Jewish Studies Department at Rutgers University, the dreidel has gone through a good deal of cross-cultural evolution. It entered Jewish tradition as a gambling device the English called a teetotum. The top has four sides that indicate what players should do with a center pot of money: put in, take half, take all, or do nothing. Shandler told me that the game has roots in Greek and Roman tradition. But it was the Ashkenazi Jews in Germany who adopted it into their Hanukkah celebrations because it was one of the few times in the Jewish calendar year that rabbis permitted games of chance.
Learning that history from Shandler helped me realize my "adultlescent" desire to blend dreidels and drinking could join a centuries-long tradition of adapting the game to what Shandler called the “contemporary moment.” The top hadn’t been tied into a drinking game in any folk traditions known to the professor, but he admitted he liked the idea. “Holiday celebrations are socializing, and so is drinking! The idea that you would integrate the two and take this toy—which is very much thought of as a kids game, and you're playing as adults—it's a way of saying, here's this thing we've got, so let's integrate it into the way we practice the holiday.”
I found a few dreidel drinking games scattered across the internet, but none of them really made sense for long-term playability. To fulfill my destiny of really evolving the dreidel game, I enlisted my fellow child of Abraham, Emerson Rosenthal, to help come up with rules. We schlepped over to Beverly's, a bar on the Lower East Side of New York City, to figure it out through trial and error. For all intents and purposes, here’s how to play "Hay" Fever, the Dreidel Drinking, and Ashkenazi Yahtzee—three new games that are sure to sweep the nation during Hanukkah 2017 and captivate the minds and livers of young Jews and gentiles.
The Setup
Step one: Find a flat surface. The Beverly’s bar has all these nice tiles, so our vast collection of dreidels were useless. We moved to a table.
Step 2: Make sure you have a lot of different dreidels. Each one has its own unique spin, and like a good pool cue, you’ll want to find yours.
Depending on the surface you’re using, creating barriers for your dreidel game could be essential: You’ll very likely lose a few to a beer-soaked bar floor (another reason why it’s good to bring many dreidels).
Next: Drinks. Otherwise, dreidel is just dreidel.
Know your symbols. For example, Gimel is in the photo above. It means you “get” everything. The other symbols are Hay (ה), which means take half; Shin (ש), which means add to the pot; and Nun (נ), which generally means nothing happens. We amped it up a little.
"Hay" Fever
The first, rather intense version of the dreidel game involves making your opponent drink as much as possible. Gimel: Your opponent drinks his whole beer. Hay: Your opponent drinks half his beer. Shin: You drink half your beer. Nun: You drink your whole beer.
This version of the game goes through beers very quickly.
So get more beer.
For reference, this is what it looks like when you chug four beers each within ten minutes of gameplay.
Blowing on your dreidel can be lucky, if you believe in such things, so I instituted a “no Jewish magic” rule...
And drank until we came up with a better version of the game.
(This included Google.)
OK, here it is:
The Dreidel Drinking Game
The Dreidel Drinking Game, as we dubbed it, is much more manageable. Each player pours a generous portion of a drink into the “pot.” We used a rocks glass, but you can use any kind of glass. Hell, even a bowl would work. G: Drink the pot. H: Drink half the pot. S: Pour into the pot. N: Nothing happens.
This version worked much better.
I found this metal dreidel was the best, by far, for me. It looked like the top from Inception and spins long enough to order another drink.
I recommend that everyone drink the same beverage for this version of the game, but you do you.
Tables work for this version of the game...
And so does throwing your dreidels like dice.
Ashkenazi Yahtzee
If you actually want to play dreidel like dice, each player rolls and then splits the difference between the scores to determine who drinks and how much. G: 4; H: 3; S: 2; N: 1. Subtract the loser’s number from the victor’s to determine how many glugs—or shots—the loser has to drink.
This is me endorsing my own game, because I am drunk.
We even got the DJ, who is a Catholic, to play. He thought the game was “cool.”
Because I was drunk, I tried to play dreidel like Beyblades: Two tops enter, and the top that keeps spinning wins. It was cool in theory, but dreidels stop when they hit anything, so it’s pretty hard to win.
Did we make dreidel, and by extension, Jewish culture, better, by inventing this drinking game? Yes.
I drank the most, which means I win the prize: A pastrami sandwich at Katz’s famous delicatessen, which happens to be just a few blocks away from the bar.
Now, that’s what I call the Holy Spirit.
Happy Hanukkah.
Special thanks to Emerson Rosenthal for developing the rules and playing the game.
